Questions of Travel
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IN MEMORY OF LEAH AKIE
Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle…
E. M. Forster,
Howards End
But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty
Elizabeth Bishop,
“Questions of Travel”
Contents
Title Page
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I
Laura, 1960s
Laura, 1970s
Ravi, 1970s
Laura, 1970s
Ravi, 1970s
Laura, 1980s
Ravi, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Ravi, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Ravi, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Laura, 1980s
Ravi, 1980s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 1990s
Laura, 1990s
Ravi, 2000
Ravi, 2000
Laura, 1999–2000
Ravi, 2000
Laura, 2000
Ravi, 2000
Ravi, 2000
Laura, 2000
Ravi, 2000
II
Laura, 2000
Ravi, 2000–2001
Laura, 2000–2001
Ravi, 2001
Laura, 2001
Ravi, 2001
Ravi, 2001
Ravi, 2001
Laura, 2001
Laura, 2001
Laura, 2002
Ravi, 2002
Laura, 2002
Ravi, 2002
Laura, 2002
Ravi, 2003
Laura, 2003
Ravi, 2003
Laura, 2003
Ravi, 2003
Laura, 2003
Laura, 2003
Ravi, 2003
Laura, 2003
Ravi, 2003
Ravi, 2003
Laura, 2003
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Ravi, 2004
Laura, 2004
Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Michelle de Kretser
Newsletters
Copyright Page
I
Anywhere! Anywhere!
Charles Baudelaire,
“Anywhere Out of the World”
Laura, 1960s
WHEN LAURA WAS TWO, the twins decided to kill her.
They were eight when she was born. Twenty-three months later, their mother died. Their father’s aunt Hester, spry and recently back in Sydney after half a lifetime in London, came to look after the children until a suitable arrangement could be made. She stayed until Laura left school.
Look at it from the boys’ point of view: their sister arrived, they stood by their mother’s chair and watched an alien, encircled by her arms, fasten itself to her nipple. Their mother didn’t die at once but she was never well again. Breast cancer. They were clever children, they made the connection. In their tent under the jacaranda, they put together a plan.
Once or twice a year, as long as she lived, Laura Fraser had the water dream. There was silky blue all around her, pale blue overhead; she glided through silence blotched with gold. Separate things ran together and were one thing. She was held and set free. It was the most wonderful dream. But on waking, Laura was always a little sad, too, prey to the sense of something ending before its time.
She had no recollection of how it had gone on that Saturday morning in 1966, her brothers out in the street with bat and ball, and Hester, who had switched off her radio just in time, summoned by a splash. No one could say how the safety catch on the swimming-pool gate had come undone; the twins, questioned, had blank, golden faces. Next door’s retriever was finally deemed responsible, since a culprit, however improbable, had to be found.
To the unfolding of these events, the boys brought the quizzical detachment of a general outmaneuvered in a skirmish. It was always instructive to see how things went. They were only children, ingenious and limited. They had no real appreciation of consequences or the relative weight of decisions. If Laura had owned a kitten, they might have drowned that instead.
The pool was filled in. For that, too, the twins blamed their sister. Their mother had taught them to swim in that pool. They could remember water beaded on her arms, the scuttle of light over turquoise tiles.
Laura, 1970s
LONG-FACED AND AMBER-EYED, what Hester brought to mind was a benevolent goat. She had spent the first seven years of her life in India, from which misfortune her complexion, lightly polished beech, never recovered.
Every night, Laura listened while Hester read about a magic land called Narnia. By day, the child visited bedrooms. They contained only built-in robes—a profound unfairness. Still she slid open each door. Still she dreamed and hoped.
Glamour, on the other hand, was easily located. It emanated from the sky-blue travel case in which Hester kept her souvenirs of the Continent. There was a tiny Spanish doll with a lace mantilla and a gilded fan. There was a program from Le lac des cygnes at the Paris Opéra, and a ticket from the train that had carried Hester over the Alps. Dijon was a menu gastronomique, Venice a sea-green, gold-flecked bead. An envelope held postcards of the Nativity and the Fall as depicted by Old Masters, and tucked between these arrivals and expulsions, a snapshot of Hester overexposed in white-framed dark glasses against the Greek trinity of sea, sunlight and symmetrical stone.
Laura would beg for the stories attached to these marvels. Because otherwise they merely thrilled—they were only crystals of Aeroplane Jelly: ruby red, licked from the palm, briefly sweet. Hester saw a small, plain face that pleaded and couldn’t be refused. But the tales she offered it disturbed her.
As a young woman, she
had settled in London. There, stenographically efficient in dove-hued blouses, she survived a firm of solicitors, a theatrical agency and two wartime ministries. Then she turned forty and went to work for a man named Nunn. On the occasion of the Coronation, Nunn smoothed his moustache, offered Hester a glass of sherry and promised her tremendous times. Hester expended three pages on this in her diary but not a word on the practical arrangement at which she had arrived with the mathematician from Madras who rented the flat below hers. Novelties to which he introduced her included cheating at bridge and a sour fish soup.
In Hester’s girlhood it had been hinted that France was a depraved sort of place, so naturally it was to Paris that her thoughts turned when she realized, as her third Christmas in his office approached, that she was in love with Nunn. Hester imagined him making her his mistress in a room with a view of the Eiffel Tower—she imagined it at length. An accordionist played “Under the Bridges of Paris” beneath their window; Nunn threw a pillow at him. Food was still rationed in England, so Nunn gave orders for tender steaks and velvety puddings to be placed under silver covers and left at their door. Their bed was draped in mauve silk—no, a deep, rich red. When Hester learned that her employer intended to spend the holidays with his wife’s parents in Hull, she crossed the Channel anyway. Nunn might detect traces of French wickedness about her when she returned and be moved to act.
Paris, in those years still trying to crawl out from under the war, was morose and inadequately heated—scarcely different, in fact, from London. But a precedent had been set. Every year, Hester penny-pinched and went without so that she might go on spending her holidays abroad. Partly it was the enduring hope that she might yet return with something—an anecdote, a daring way with a scarf—that would draw her to Nunn’s attention in that way at last. Partly, and increasingly as time passed, it was the dismay that pierced her at the prospect of solitary days spent in London with neither companion nor occupation (for her arrangement with the mathematician was confined to alternate Wednesdays).
When Nunn’s wife finally came to her senses and died, he promptly married her nurse. Hester realized that she was fed up with England. On the voyage home to Sydney, she stood at the ship’s rail late one night. The eleven volumes of her diary splashed one by one into Colombo Harbor.
Because all this had to be excluded from the stories laid before Laura, they suggested journeys undertaken in order to seek out delightful new places. Whereas really, thought Hester, her travels had been a kind of flight.
The way to crowd out her misgivings was to talk and talk. So it wasn’t enough to describe the dishes on the handwritten menu from Dijon: a pear tart as wide as a wheel, snails who had carried their coffins on their backs. Hester found herself including the lilies etched on the pink glass shades of the lamp on her table, and the stag’s head mounted on the wall. She described the husband and wife who, having had nothing to say to each other for forty years, inspected her throughout her meal. Where recollection had worn thin, she patched and embroidered. Laura shivered to hear of the tight little square in front of the restaurant where once the guillotine had stood: a detail Hester concocted on the spot, feeling that her narrative lacked drama and an educational aim.
So the story that made its way to Laura was always vivid, informative, and incidental to what mattered. Conjuring the glories of Athens, Hester passed over the unspeakable filth of Greek public lavatories that obscured her memory of the Acropolis, greed and incaution having led her to consume a dish of oily beans in Syntagma Square. Calling up the treasures of the Uffizi, she didn’t say that she had moved blindly from one colored rectangle to the next, picturing ways in which Nunn might compromise himself irrevocably in the filing room. Rose windows and Last Judgments dominated her description of Chartres, but when Hester had been making the rounds of that cold wonder, all her attention was concentrated on the selection of a promising effigy. Tour guides harangued, Frasers howled in their Presbyterian graves. Hester lit candles in a side chapel, knelt, offered brief, fervent prayers.
After talking about her travels, Hester was often restless. Turning the dial on her transistor late one night, she heard a woman say gravely, Away is hard to go, but no one / Asked me to stay.
Ravi, 1970s
THE SEA TUGGED PATIENTLY at the land, a child plucking at a sluggish parent. That was the sound behind all other sounds. Ravi’s life ran to its murmur of change.
The town, a pretty backwater, lay on the west coast of Sri Lanka, twenty-three miles from Colombo. The baroque flourish of its colonial churches threw tourists into confusion. They had come prepared for Eastern outlandishness, not third-rate copies of home.
The new airport wasn’t far away. At night, the tilted lights of planes were mobile constellations, multiplying from year to year.
Ravi lived in a lane crammed with life and food. Foreigners sometimes strayed there by mistake. If they noticed the Mendises’ house, they saw a box devoid of charm. But the house was built of bricks plastered over and colorwashed blue. It contained an electric table fan, a head of Nefertiti stamped on black velvet, a three-piece cane lounge suite. The roof held through ravaging rain. In the compound lived a merry brown dog called Marmite, who could sing the chorus from “Cold, Cold Heart.” There was also a tree with mulberries as fat as caterpillars, and a row of violently orange ixoras. The lavatory was indoors and flushed.
He hated girls and sisters. How had Priya come by a copy of the Jacaranda School Atlas? She made a great show of studying its pages. When Ravi came to stand at her elbow, she spread her hands and leaned forward, calling, “Mummy, Mummy! Aiyya is breathing on my book.”
On the veranda, their mother was singing to the baby: John, John, the gray goose is gone. In a classroom that resembled a stable, with a half wall and a wooden gate, Anglican nuns had taught Carmel to sing. Her husband could play the guitar, and there was the radio, of course, but music in that house meant singing. The older children sang Why can’t my goose and Christmas is coming, The goose is getting fat. Geese, like God, were taken on trust and for the same reason: they must exist somewhere, there were so many songs about them. Carmel broke off to nibble Varunika’s tiny nose. Then it was Five golden rings, Four calling birds…She had sung it to each of her children, standing them up on her knee.
The baby was beneath Ravi’s attention. But he was only ten months older than Priya. The two fought or played with ferocious concentration. In cramped rooms, they exercised childhood’s talent for finding secret places.
There were games with the neighbors’ children. Brandishing a stick to signify authority, Kang kang buuru! chanted the leader. Chin chin noru! came the chorus. “Will you do what I say?” “Yes!” “Run, run, run and bring me…” When it was Ravi’s turn, he would request objects that struck him as magical: a square white stone, a green feather. But Priya set daring tasks, ordering her subjects to pluck a mango from a tall tree, or to pull the tail of the chained monkey who performed for tourists, his face savage and full of sorrow.
Long after a shower was installed in the house, the children went on making a game of well baths, each icy bucketful eliciting screams of joyful fear. The bathroom and lavatory, the last rooms in the house to be built, were not completed until Ravi was almost four. Perhaps a memory of this work, an odor of damp cement, a sense of walls rising, his parents’ preoccupation with the shaping of domestic space, ran under a game the boy devised when he was older. Accompanied by Priya, he would roam the town looking at houses. When he hissed, “Here!” the children would stand and stare. Priya liked to speculate about the people who lived in the house: she assigned names and ages to the children, she sought Ravi’s opinion on whether their mother was stern or smiling, she dithered over the dishes they preferred. Ravi bore her babyish chatter in silence and contempt. He cared nothing for the lives enclosed within a set of walls and was excited only by the character of the house itself. A circular porch lent this one a jovial air, a double row of openwork bricks rendered another spiteful, wh
ile a third, an upstairs house situated deep in a treed garden, exuded a sinister charm. Ravi’s imagination worked to penetrate the enigma of each dwelling: the brilliance and dark within, the disposition of rooms, the dusty places where dead flies collected.
This game, at once deeply satisfying to both children and the source of bitter quarrels, continued throughout the long Christmas holidays one year.
Laura, 1970s
A SUMMER CAME WHEN, having twirled up the seat to adjust its height, Laura would photograph herself in the booth at Central Station. There were weeks when all her pocket money, changed into twenty-cent coins, disappeared that way. The result was always the same: a gloomy adolescent skulking under a bush of hair.
One day she pulled back the pleated curtain and emerged from the booth to see Cameron. Her brother had his back to her and was using one of the payphones, listening with one palm on the tiled wall. His head drew all the light in that dim place. The receiver, pressed to it, had the black potential of a gun.
Laura dodged back into the booth. Why had Cameron left his office to use a public phone? When she heard the whirr that signaled the delivery of her photos, she peered out. He had vanished.
The way home lay past gardens that were gatherings of green decay. Rain might fall, caressing and warm, hardly different from the thick, damp heat that preceded it. Now and then a cloudburst encouraged delirium. Timetables and commuters were thrown into chaos, traffic lights blacked out, the broken bodies of umbrellas littered the streets. Sydney quite forgot that it was Western and efficient. It squinted over its brown back at Africa, at India; an old, old memory of wholeness stirred.
After the storm, pavements showed a heightened brilliance of blossom. Here and there, a stone face wore a cockroach veil.
When there was a scorcher, afternoon tightened around the streets in a blinding bandage. On the nature strips, the nerve had gone from the grass. But in the park the light was necklaces and pendants looping through trees. Laura lifted an arm from the elbow like an Ancient Egyptian; admiring her pretty hands, with their pointed fingers, her thoughts were bright and dark as leaves. Half-naked children were to be seen darting through a shimmer. Laura would have liked to join them beside the fountain, but an elf shouted, “What’s Vince gunna do for a face when the camel wants its bum back?” and Laura recognized that she was no longer a child. She walked on, badly frightened. She had just realized—which is to say, felt—that she was going to die. The elf, too, was doomed, along with Vince and all that shrieking crew. The broad-faced European woman stealing municipal begonias would die, and those two snooty girls flicking their flat hair at each other. All the teachers at school and everyone in Fleetwood Mac. No one on earth would be spared. The galloping gaucho, the indigo Tuareg on his dune: inside each, the skeleton smiled. The dead strolled through the suburbs, through the city, their numbers uncountable and always on the rise. How could anyone, knowing this, select the correct concourse at Central, or deal with the yellow fat on a chop while not disdaining the multitudes that starved? The gravel slurred under Laura’s shoe, the planet groaned as it turned. Behind her, screams revived and fell like sirens.